This year, the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities are supporting their arts & humanities PhD students (based across 17 Scottish institutions) with residencies for creative practice, working with Cove Park to provide dedicated creative time, space, and freedom to develop their doctoral work within a supportive and inspiring context.

Marissa Clarke is an interdisciplinary researcher undertaking a SGSAH/AHRC funded PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Her practice involves the mediums of movement, sound, and writing. She was born in Glasgow and is currently based in Edinburgh.

Her PhD project explores the phenomenology of yoga, the body, and sound. She records and listens to yoga soundscapes, foregrounding the tactile-kinesthetic and aural ways of knowing, mediated by breathing bodies and their affective (inter)corporeal relations. She is interested in the political aspects of ‘breathing’ and ‘listening’ as socially engaged practice. Her residency at Cove Park will provide time and space to experiment with her 150+ hours of field recordings, while she continues to work on her thesis.

Marissa has an interdisciplinary background in religious studies, marketing studies, and health research. She is also a yoga teacher with six years of experience teaching classes in studios, gyms, and universities in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In January 2024, Marissa will be spending five months in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she will be developing her practice-based collaborative sound project ‘Acoustemologies of Breath’ (working title), with creative mentorship from composer-performer and artivist Professor Isabel Nogueira.